Every year, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) offers the Donald Peterson Student Travel Award to one individual who has either studied or is currently studying in a graduate archival program in the United States. Jessica Serrao, a library associate at NCSU Libraries, was chosen by the SAA to be this year’s recipient.

“The Donald Peterson Award is to help either a graduate student or a recent graduate attend the annual meeting for the Society of American Archivists, so they’re really looking to increase participation by students and new professionals in the field, and get people more involved in the annual meeting by bringing new voices to the table,” Serrao said.

Serrao has worked at NCSU Libraries throughout her graduate student career, and has worked on several projects during her time there.

“I’ve actually held several positions at NCSU Libraries over the course of my graduate career,” Serrao said. “I first worked as a graduate assistant at the Special Collections service desk, so that was helping researchers find and use our archival materials, and then I also worked on a social media archives toolkit project, and that publicly documented NCSU Libraries’ collections. In my current position as library associate, I focus on processing digital and physical archival collections so that they can be more discoverable and accessible, so that involves creating online collection guides that document the contents of a collection so that patrons can then find the information they need.”

Alongside her coworkers, Serrao was committed to the projects she worked on.

“Jessica is very committed to making it possible for researchers to find and use the unique collections that we have at NC State, and order to do that, she has had to be very organized and has to communicate very well,” said Linda Sellars, the head of technical services for Special Collections at NCSU Libraries and Serrao’s direct supervisor. “She is very interested in in all of the different subject areas that we work in, and it is helping researchers to use the collections in all of those areas.”

Serrao’s interest in archives and records was spurred on during her time in high school, where she took courses on history.

“When I was in high school, I actually took a local history and genealogy course, so that got me looking into and researching my own family as well as researching the communities around me,” Serrao said. “That piqued my curiosity in history and culture in general, so I continued on into an undergrad program to receive my bachelor’s degree in anthropology. I focused on social anthropology and cultural materials, so it’s kind of progressed from there.”

Over the course of her university education, Serrao has taken part in a dual degree program from NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill, in which she earned a master’s degree in public history from NC State and a master’s in library science from UNC-CH.

“The point of [the dual degree program] is that it’s supposed to provide you with two master’s degrees within a three year period, usually three or four years,” Serrao said. “The public history program at NC State really focuses on how the public consumes history and teaching how we can better present history to the public for them to be able to understand it. From there, the public history program then compliments the library science program [at UNC-CH], which focuses a lot more on the archival side of things, and more on how we organize materials, how we describe materials to provide that access to find what we need in our collection.”

As a part of receiving the Donald Peterson Student Travel Award, Serrao will be attending the Joint Annual Meeting of the Council of State Archivists, the National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators, and SAA.

“The Joint Annual meeting is going to be this coming August in Washington, D.C., so the award will help to offset the cost of attending that,” Serrao said. “I’ll actually be chairing a session while I’m there, and this will be my first time chairing a session, so I’m very excited to be a part of that. The session itself is titled ‘Documenting Divisions, Strategies and Workloads for Consistent and Transparent Processing’ so I’ll be on that panel with six other archivists who are presenting key studies that will discuss different policies, workflows, and tools they use to provide consistency in documenting their work.”

More information on the Donald Peterson Student Travel Award can be found here.